A few things were said above that aren't technically correct.

Matter that falls into an EH is not turned into energy. Especially not before it hits the EH. If you fell into a super massive BH, you would experience no pain or distortion as you hit the EH. If you did the same with a stellar BH, you would be torn to shreds from the tidal forces before you hit the EH. That is because the singularity is so much closer to you in a stellar, than a supermassive. Matter may indeed be turned into energy at some point after it hits the EH, but never before. The event horizon is a fairly boring thing in most regards. It is meaningless except for the fact that once something passes this boundary of blackness (from the outside), it will never return. Nothing special happens to matter and energy at this point, its just screwed out of its return-ticket.

"From a distant observer, no star has collapsed into a singularity". This is a bit weird. From a distant observer, we stopped receiving protons once the matter or energy hit the EH boundary. So we have no idea what happened. It all could have turned into a ham sandwich and we will never know. Either way, time did not stop. Our outside observation of the time has been halted because no photons can come to us. Also, time and light are quantum, not continuous. Some people have said that we would see a clock falling into a BH and see it hit the EH, and see that image forever. This is very wrong. We would see if falling, see the time slow, see it red shift, and eventually start to flicker and then nothing. This is because the photons emitted take longer and longer to come back to us because they are moving much slower the closer to the EH they are. A photon emitted exactly at the EH will remain motionless in regards to the singularity since the 2 forces are equal.

I believe the reason we think there is a singularity, instead of just an EH sized and shape sphere of mass, is because of the tidal forces observed. I "think" that the gravity given off by a 10-sun mass at a point is felt differently than a 10-sun mass given off by a 10-sun EH sphere. Which is why smaller BHs have such wild tidal forces, and super massive BHs are much more gentle indomitable forces.

There, I don't think I butched physics too much. I'm definitely not a physicist, but ive done a lot of casual research into BHs.